This book contains the letters written by Eleonora Duse to her daughter Enrichetta Marchetti, later Mrs Bullough, from 1892 to April 1924, the year of Duse’s death in the United States. Consisting of 452 letters, cards, postcards and telegrams, the correspon-
dence is preserved among the Duse papers in the Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice, following a donation made by the actress’ granddaughter, Eleonora Ilaria Bullough or Sister Mary Mark. Some of the documents are original while the others are transcriptions by Duse’s daughter in small notebooks known as the Quaderni di Enrichetta.
The publication of this material – for the fi rst time ordered chronologically – provides a highly original and unpublished source for knowledge about Duse as an artist and mother.
Thus, for example, we learn from her own words about her experience in her fi rst and only role in a silent movie, or the hardships she endured during the Great War. The last section of the book focuses on the problems besetting her return to the stage in 1921 up to her last tragic tour of the United States. A cursory look at the names gives an idea of the vast network of signifi cant relations of mutual esteem and friendship that the actress enjoyed with leading fi gures in European art and culture in the late 19th and early 20th century: Arrigo Boito, Giuseppe Primoli, Alexandre Dumas fi ls, Giuseppe Giacosa Giovanni Verga, Luigi Albertini, Marco Praga, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Giovanni Papini, Matilde Serao, Gaetano Salvemini, Luigi Pirandello, Adolfo de Bosis, Sibilla Aleramo, Paul Claudel, Hermann Sudermann, Hugo von Hoffmansthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, George Bernard Shaw, Edouard Schneider, Isadora Duncan, Edward Gordon Craig, Camilla Mallarmé, Yvette Guilbert, Aurélien Lugné-Poe, Lucien Guitry, Auguste Rodin, Olga Signorelli, David Wark Griffi th, Laurence Alma Tadema, Alexandre Wolkoff and Natalia Gontcharova.
What emerges from the letters is a complex mother-daughter relationship in which the roles at times were inevitably reversed. In fact the adventurous life of a mother continuously on the move contrasts with the regular quiet life of a model mother and wife in
Cambridge, England, where Enrichetta lived with her husband Edward Bullough, a professor of Italian at the prestigious British university. The rich, dense mother-daughter correspondence is published by Marsilio, Venice in its biography and correspondence
series, thus ensuring a high profi le and a wide circulation for the book.